A village of sorts had been laid out on the lake bed, but clearly the designer had been working with some logic that Corran couldn’t understand. Closest to their position were small rounded buildings, bowl-like and inverted, with any opening in them pointing farther east, away from the Jedi. Corran counted two dozen of the stone huts, gathered in four rough ranks of six each. Beyond them came a trio of larger buildings, on the same design, and closest to the rising sun was a single, very large building—easily large enough to house a freighter and have room left over for storing cargo between trips.
Two things struck Corran about the buildings. The first was that they reminded him of mollusk shells. He knew of sea life that appropriated the castoff shells of other creatures, and found it easy to imagine that the Yuuzhan Vong had just come down and grown domiciles for themselves. He had no idea what they did with the creatures that actually grew the shells, but assumed they either moved on to grow the larger ones, or likely were a prime source of food.
The second thing that he noticed was that he got a Force sense of inhabitants only in the smallest of the shells. He glanced over at Ganner. “Something is wrong with the people.”
The other Jedi’s eyes narrowed. “It is as if there is static coming through the Force from them. Their link to the Force is weakening. I think they’re dying.”
“Good insight. And you get nothing from the larger shells?”
“Shells? Of course, that’s what they are. No, I don’t.”
“So, if there are Yuuzhan Vong around, they’re likely in those bigger ones.”
“That would be my assumption.” Ganner pointed a finger at the village and circled it around. “Notice anything about the slashrats?”
Corran stretched out with the Force. He found slashrats easily enough, but they were all twenty meters from the Yuuzhan Vong village. They were active and would move toward it, directly or at an angle, then turn back. Some would even tunnel deep under it but never come up through the heart of it. “Do you think they’re able to repel the slashrats?”
“I don’t know.” Ganner pulled his sandshoes from where he’d fastened them over his back to climb, and started to buckle them to his boots. “A quick look might tell us something.”
The older Jedi frowned. “We’re not very agile in these things. Going down there could be suicidal.”
Ganner smiled coldly. “I have an assist that makes me more agile.”
“You’re not going down there alone.”
“You will be too slow. If we get into trouble, you’ll be—”
“I’ll be waiting for you to use your assist to get me out.” Corran pulled on his sandshoes. “Trista should have you all knowledgeable about what is normal on this rock, so keep your eyes open for anything unusual down there. Let’s get samples of the sand and figure out what keeps the slashrats back.”
“I’m not stupid, you know.”
Corran arched an eyebrow at him. “You say that, but you’re the one who suggested going down there.”
“How smart are you for going with me?”
Corran rolled his eyes. “Just move it.”
Ganner led the way, and the slashrats gave them a wide berth. The two Jedi slipped into the Yuuzhan Vong village at the western end, and each of them crouched in the shadow of one of the shell huts. From inside the hut Corran expected to sense the peaceful flow of the Force he related to sleeping creatures, but jagged breaks in it disrupted the pattern.
He shuffled his way forward and discovered an opening on the eastern side of the shell. The creature that had originally grown the shell must have coiled about a central axis as it grew its armor home. The shell had been set in the sand so the lip of the opening dug into the sand a little. It appeared to Corran, given his sense of where the inhabitant lay, that the person crawled into the shell, then pulled himself deeper into it, sleeping in the small section that lay above the opening itself.
Paralleling Ganner, he moved deeper into the village. His sense of things remained the same. He stopped and pulled from a belt pouch a small duraplast cylinder, then dug it into the ground to take a sample of the sand. He stoppered it, then noticed movement in the sand. A beetle climbed to the top of the sample and started circling around the glassy wall, looking for a way out.
Corran slipped that cylinder back into his pouch and pulled out another empty one. He dug down a little bit into the sand and noticed a beetle emerge into the hole and inspect it. He scooped that beetle up in a cylinder and discovered, by dint of the twin horns on its head, that it was different from the first beetle he’d captured. He dug around some more and found a third type of beetle, much smaller than the first two, and caught it up. He wasn’t certain if it was just young or an entirely different species.
More test holes produced nothing, so Corran started to move on. Ganner had gotten ahead of him and was huddled behind a shell hut in the first rank. Corran immediately cut over to his left, putting him directly on Ganner’s track. He shouldn’t have gone that far ahead. The fact that Ganner appeared to be fingering his lightsaber and had a rising sense of anxiety about him began to alarm Corran.
All of a sudden something shrieked from within one of the shells. A desperate creature crawled from a shell between the two Jedi and stumbled to his feet. He looked vaguely human, but was knock-kneed and had growths on his arms and legs and spine that looked like coral outcroppings. He clawed at a big coral spike growing from his right cheek and shrieked in a hoarse voice that was more animal than man, and more pain than anything else.
The creature ran past Ganner, then fell in the sand and struggled to get up again. The sand itself around the creature began to vibrate, with a dusty mist rising from it as if it were steam boiling off water. Corran couldn’t figure out what was causing the sand to shiver, but he felt a curious vibration from his own belt. He pulled out the beetles he’d captured, and one, the horned one, was beating wings furiously.
Two long and lean Yuuzhan Vong warriors emerged from the first two medium-size shells—which had openings large enough so the tall aliens did not have to stoop as they came out. Neither of them seemed surprised or concerned about the slave. With a fluid grace that would have seemed almost sensual, were they not cadaverously slender, the Yuuzhan Vong split up and approached the slave from either side. One, then the other, taunted him with harsh and sharp comments, causing the slave to cower for a moment, and dart away from one, then back toward the other.
All the while the sand around his feet danced as the beetles flapped their wings in alarm.
Corran felt the slave’s fear spike through the Force, then a severe burst of static rattled through Corran. The slave’s fear vanished to be replaced by fury. With fingers hooked into claws and a feral scream falling from his lips, the slave charged headlong at one of the Yuuzhan Vong.
The alien warrior barked abruptly in what Corran took to be a cruel laugh. The warrior dodged to the right, then brought his left fist up in a punch that caught the slave over his heart. The slave arced up into the air and flew back a meter or so, then landed on his heels and flopped onto his back. Corran felt certain he’d heard ribs crack, but the slave rolled to the left and stood again, then charged the other Yuuzhan Vong.
The second warrior stopped the charge with a straight right hand to the slave’s face. The sharp pop of bones breaking overrode the slave’s muted whimper. The Yuuzhan Vong took a step back, then dropped another right hand onto the same cheek. The bony knobs on his knuckles came away dark and glistening. Then he swept his left leg up and around in a kick that slammed into the slave’s ribs and pitched him back toward the first Yuuzhan Vong.
The first Yuuzhan Vong warrior opened his arms, almost in a welcoming gesture. He said something to the battered slave. It seemed like a question, and the reaction from the slave was one of disbelief. The slave spat, hugging arms to his ribs, then snarled and dashed at his interrogator.
The first Yuuzhan Vong warrior hammered the slave with a left hook that snapped off the coral
spike on the man’s right cheek. The blow spun him around. The Yuuzhan Vong then drove his right fist into the slave’s back, precisely over the kidneys. Corran winced in sympathy as the slave went to his knees.
A quick burst of fury alerted Corran to a new problem. Ganner had brought his lightsaber to hand but had not yet ignited it. Knowing what Ganner wanted to do, but also knowing it would get them and the students killed, Corran acted. He used the Force to drill through Ganner’s sense of outrage and pumped the acrid scent of stink straight into his brain.
Ganner immediately dropped to his knees and doubled over. He covered his mouth with his gloved hands as his chest convulsed. What little was left of his supper leaked out through his fingers and puddled in the sand. He shot Corran an incendiary glance, then his body heaved again.
Beyond him, in the space between the huts, the two Yuuzhan Vong towered over their slave. Both of them barked questions at him. Confusion rolled off the slave, then outrage. He coughed out an incoherent comment and composed his face into a mask of defiance. He pushed off the ground with one hand and tried to rise and run, but his captors never gave him the chance to escape.
A kick to the stomach jetted dark fluid from the slave’s mouth. Blood rolled down from his cheeks like a flood of black tears. The Yuuzhan Vong circled the slave, their punches and kicks knocking him back and forth between them. If not for the sheer violence of their assault, he would have fallen to the sand. They kept him upright despite the fact that their blows shattered his skeleton and made it impossible for him to keep himself on his feet.
Finally the slave sagged to the ground. He was so far gone that a few more kicks couldn’t even send a spark of pain from him to Corran through the Force. The Yuuzhan Vong looked at one another, traded laughter and comments. They mimed blows they had struck and used their hands to mimic the way the slave had bounced between them. Then they stooped and grabbed the slave, wrist and ankle, and carried him to the edge of the village. Swinging him back and forth four times, they lofted him out into the sand, and very quickly a slashrat killball marked the place he landed.
The Yuuzhan Vong picked up handfuls of sand and used it to scrub blood from their bodies, then wandered back to their huts and disappeared back inside.
Corran projected the image of the hills into Ganner’s mind, then began his own retreat from the village. He took it slowly and monitored Ganner’s progress. He waited close by until the younger Jedi actually got out on the sand outside of the village. He hoped the tang of killscent would remind Ganner how close death lay to them.
Again nestled in the rocks of the hills, the two Jedi removed their sandshoes to begin their ascent. Ganner sullenly strapped the shoes across his back, then turned on Corran.
“If you ever do anything like that again, I will kill you.”
“At least then death will be deferred, not immediate, as it would have been here.”
“That man, you watched them beat him to death, and you did nothing.”
“That’s right, I did nothing because our tracks could be followed back to the students. We saw only two of the Yuuzhan Vong, but there could be dozens more, maybe hundreds in the big shell. Cutting those two down, right there, if you could have done it, would have doomed Dr. Pace and Trista and the others.”
Ganner snorted angrily. “Not if they were the only two Yuuzhan Vong here.”
“And what do you think the chances of that are?”
The younger man arched a dark eyebrow. “There are only two Jedi here.”
“Unassailable logic, that, Ganner.” Corran settled the sandshoes across his back, then tugged on the cuffs of his gloves. “Maybe there are two, maybe there are two thousand. I don’t doubt that before we get off this rock, we’re going to have to kill some of them, but the longer we can delay that confrontation, the better.”
“So more people can die?”
“No, so we have a good chance of stopping the Agamarians from being captured. What we saw here is a data point, and one I want to study. That wasn’t just a beating.”
“It was sport, cruel sport.”
“Maybe, at the end, yes, but there was something else.” Corran frowned. “The way they spoke to him, they expected something from him. Their contempt, their anger, as shown by the frenzy at the end—something else was going on there.”
“Fine, you think about the motives of our murderers. I don’t think that data point will do you any good.”
“Maybe not, but it’s not all we’ve got. Our soil samples are more data points—”
“Killing Yuuzhan Vong will generate precious data points for you.”
“Maybe. Dead Jedi would make for even more data points.” Corran tapped two fingers against his right temple. “The vital thing right now is that we get back to the students, see if they can help us figure out what’s going on here, then see if we can get away safely with what we know.”
“And, if we can’t?”
Corran shrugged. “The first few times the Yuuzhan Vong fought Jedi, we won. We’ll just have to see how far we can extend that streak.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jacen Solo’s eyes snapped open, and for a moment, he wondered where he was. He knew he was on Belkadan, but he found himself surprised to be back at the ExGal facility. Why that surprised him he couldn’t immediately identify. He kicked off the light blanket covering him, then swung his legs over the edge of the cot and sat up.
Jacen raked fingers back through long brown hair, then pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. Before he had awakened, he’d been in a Yuuzhan Vong village, the one where the villips were being grown. He’d gone there to free the slaves. He’d waded into the water and called them to him. They’d come, and their master had come after them. As the slave master had done with the old man, Jacen had left the Yuuzhan Vong warrior slowly sinking in the murky, still water.
It feels so real. Jacen pulled his hands away from his eyes, then focused until his hands emerged as ghostly shadows in the dim light. His hands still tingled with the sense of having held his lightsaber in a duel with the Yuuzhan Vong warrior. He shifted his shoulders and stretched his back, searching for any trace of pain to somehow validate the reality of what he’d seen.
He knew it probably had just been a dream. In the week since they watched the murder of the old man, they had done quite a bit of scouting. The Yuuzhan Vong had indeed turned Belkadan—or at least this section of it—into a shipyard. They were growing villips, coralskippers, and dovin basals all over the place. The laborers were slaves all, by the look of it, though some of the overseers had aides who appeared, to Jacen, to be human and cooperating. They all had the growths on them, too, but the Force was not filled with static from the collaborators, just greatly diminished.
The vision’s being just a dream made sense. It was clearly a fantasy being fulfilled to let him drain away his frustration. He was almost willing to accept what he had seen as a dream, then to drop back off to sleep.
Two things prevented him from doing that, however. One was a sense of urgency wrapped around the vision. While he was willing to accept that his frustration was enough to give birth to the dream, his frustration had been strongest the night after watching the murder. Since then, they had not returned to that place.
The second thing was the sheer reality of the vision. It wasn’t something he was remembering, per se, but felt as if it was a glimpse at something he had to do. He knew, very well, that if a Jedi was open to the Force, bits and pieces of the future might be revealed to him. His uncle’s Master, Yoda, was known for his wisdom and ability to see pieces of the future. Jacen had never really felt he’d been gifted a vision by the Force, but it did seem to him as if this was just the sort of thing a vision like that would entail.
He got up from his cot and staggered out of the room that had once been Danni’s. Pretty much everything in it had been smashed, but he’d been able to recover a few static holographs and a couple of other little mementos he’d carry back to her. H
e shuffled his feet to move aside the detritus in the hallway, then leaned against the door jamb to the room his uncle had taken.
A small glow lamp filled the far corner of the room with warm, golden light. His uncle sat on the floor facing the doorway, all but reduced to a silhouette by the light. Jacen started to say something, but then the sense of peace and concentration he got from his uncle stilled his tongue.
This was not the first time Jacen had seen his uncle enter a Jedi trance to tighten his bonds with the Force. After the peace with the Remnant, when Luke had made changes in the structure of the academy, other apprentices had joked that the Master had become old and needed his Force naps. Jacen had laughed at that, but he envied his uncle’s connection to the Force. He wanted that intimacy himself, and he knew what sort of a price his uncle had paid to earn it. While he knew that such a bond could not be won easily, he fervently hoped his course to attaining it would be neither as long nor as twisted as his uncle’s.
He turned away from the door and stood there with his back pressed flat against the wall. His uncle had said that experience allowed one to know that hard decisions needed to be made, and deciding if what he had seen was real or not certainly qualified as a hard decision. While his head told him to doubt what he had seen, his heart urged him to go.
That choice feels right, and the Force is more about feeling than thinking. Jacen slowly exhaled, then returned to Danni’s room and slowly pulled on his combat suit. He clipped a comlink to the lapel, so he could record the data about his mission. That way, Uncle Luke’s goal will be served even if I can’t attain mine. He didn’t warn R2-D2 that he was heading out, however, since he knew the droid would wake his uncle, and the mission would be ended before it ever began.
As he walked past Luke’s door, he bowed once to his Master, and then, with a long Jedi robe shrouding him, he emerged from the ExGal facility and strode into the night.
With every step Jacen took, he found himself becoming further and further enmeshed in the vision he’d had. Every leaf, every wisp of cloud, the buzz of insects, the rattle of gravel coursing down a hillside in his wake—all of it matched what he remembered. He stopped thinking and instead concentrated on feeling, choosing his steps almost at random, yet knowing each time that he had made the right choice.
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